Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

An empire is an immense egotism.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

In this magical hour, as the black ink sky fades to forget-me-not grey and the Cyprus trees emerge from the shadows, I tune in to my heart. In clarity, I choose to step into freedom to bring lightness of being and to be love.

People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.